It was late one night, the story goes, when the ghost of Monnow Valley struck. Liam Gallagher was sleepless enough – he was staying in room three of the studio deep in the remote Welsh countryside, “the haunted one” according to the woman who ran the place. He’d often wake up in the morning to find his furniture had moved around in the night (not so much the work of a vengeful poltergeist as a piss-taking Noel). And then, one dark night at 2am, a black and beaming figure was seen stalking the rooms like a narcotic Nosferatu.
“Everyone was in bed, so I went skulking round people’s rooms while they were asleep,” Gary “Mani” Mounfield told a 2004 Oasis documentary. High on mushrooms, the Stone Roses bassist had hotwired a tractor at Rockfield Studios up the road – where his band were then recording their 1994 Second Coming album – and driven to Oasis’s studio to hunt for drugs and alcohol. “I spotted a big nugget of hashish by the side of somebody’s bed and I was reaching over to grab it and they were petrified!”
